MrWizard6600
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2006
- Messages
- 5,791
Show off your hardware fix!
So I was on my way to home depot to grab some electrical tape for a quick speaker wiring fix (simple loose connection), and it got me thinking, in all the years I've been on these boards I've never seen just a fixed stuff thread. A thread that just contains pictures of a clever (or not-so-clever) fixes for hardware problems.
I've got two that I'll post here:
simple speaker fix: The volume control (a simple potentiometer) had some kind of loose connection. For the past couple months You'd have to orient the control in such a manner to get it working, but recently it has been completly impossible to orient correctly. Realizing that it was just a loose connection, and that buying a new pair of speakers all together over something that stupid is entirely retarded, I got to work ripping apart the little nob to see if I could fix it:
The other thing is my now dead ipod nano. 8 months after this fix the thing started making wierd electrical noises, but still, i got those months back out of what would have been a useless nano. OK so, like alot of people who bought an ipod nano, the hold switch died in the "hold" position, meaning my ipod was unusable. Sometimes when i flipped it to the regular position allowing the ipod to respond, it would switch on and off sparatically making the thing useless.
So I unscrew the PCB from its little standoffs:
the hold switch just popped right out. No resistance at all. Useless. There were five (tiny, these are some of the smallest solder points I've ever seen) contacts holding the switch to the PCB. A little bit of googling revealed that two are just for support, one is a supply and the two others are returns for closing the "hold function on" circuit, and the other for closing the "hold function off" circuit. Using some basic logic I came up with the two contacts near the left side of the ipod were the two for the "hold function off".
So, all I did was a pencil mod! I tried to get a shot but the camera wasn't anywhere near powerful enough for a macro shot like that.
Rather alarmingly the ipod turned on right in my hands after getting the hold function turned off. With it on there was nothing I could really do to get the ipod turned off, so I was a little worried about a small current giving me a little shock, and my fingers did tingle, but the thing powerd up normally right in the middle of the podcast I was listening to:
So I was on my way to home depot to grab some electrical tape for a quick speaker wiring fix (simple loose connection), and it got me thinking, in all the years I've been on these boards I've never seen just a fixed stuff thread. A thread that just contains pictures of a clever (or not-so-clever) fixes for hardware problems.
I've got two that I'll post here:
simple speaker fix: The volume control (a simple potentiometer) had some kind of loose connection. For the past couple months You'd have to orient the control in such a manner to get it working, but recently it has been completly impossible to orient correctly. Realizing that it was just a loose connection, and that buying a new pair of speakers all together over something that stupid is entirely retarded, I got to work ripping apart the little nob to see if I could fix it:
The other thing is my now dead ipod nano. 8 months after this fix the thing started making wierd electrical noises, but still, i got those months back out of what would have been a useless nano. OK so, like alot of people who bought an ipod nano, the hold switch died in the "hold" position, meaning my ipod was unusable. Sometimes when i flipped it to the regular position allowing the ipod to respond, it would switch on and off sparatically making the thing useless.
So I unscrew the PCB from its little standoffs:
the hold switch just popped right out. No resistance at all. Useless. There were five (tiny, these are some of the smallest solder points I've ever seen) contacts holding the switch to the PCB. A little bit of googling revealed that two are just for support, one is a supply and the two others are returns for closing the "hold function on" circuit, and the other for closing the "hold function off" circuit. Using some basic logic I came up with the two contacts near the left side of the ipod were the two for the "hold function off".
So, all I did was a pencil mod! I tried to get a shot but the camera wasn't anywhere near powerful enough for a macro shot like that.
Rather alarmingly the ipod turned on right in my hands after getting the hold function turned off. With it on there was nothing I could really do to get the ipod turned off, so I was a little worried about a small current giving me a little shock, and my fingers did tingle, but the thing powerd up normally right in the middle of the podcast I was listening to:
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